Extra Extra: Cultural Warfare

Extra Extra won’t focus on memes but try to illustrate problems through them. To that end, the looser conditions of a column allow for visible cracks in my positions. Unanswered questions are welcomed. Criticisms formed on a mimetic hunch can be built up. Nothing here is too polished, neither is it expected to be.

As architecture culture breaks into architecture cultures, let's explore the fissures. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a constituency.

In 2008, we discovered the meme was a fun way of making a joke on the internet. Fast forward to today and suddenly The Guardian is writing about memes as the battlefields of future warfare. It is so obvious, pervasive, and seemingly unlikely to reverse itself that thinking about how this came to be feels like a waste of time. What we should ask is: What does this mean for architecture now and in the future?

Answering this isn’t easy, but we can start by documenting the ripple effects of its implications. If you aren’t familiar, my work up until this point broadcasts and tests current architectural positions on a public audience via memes. The positions come and go quickly. This column serves as a place where I will report my findings and expand upon those attitudes. Extra Extra, then, is about that which operates between architecture and everything else. It is about all that is extra to architecture outside of building: architecture culture.

Image courtesy of author.

Culture is a charged word today. When we say culture we know it as an important part of architectural history. The great tomes of Joan Ockman and K. Michael Hays describe two different periods of modern history as architecture culture and architecture theory, respectively. Architecture culture lasted between 1943-1968 and is referred to as such because it was an era marked by interpersonal relationships and disagreements driving the discourse. The period after 1968 is referred to as a period of architecture theory, and it is marked by a transition to long-form writing as discourse. So if we used to be a culture, then we were suddenly a theory, what are we now? We definitely aren’t a theory anymore. So are we in a new, slightly modified era in which architecture returns to a culture?

This isn’t the case for at least two reasons. For starters — to steal a foreboding phrase from Andrew Breitbart — culture is downstream from politics. While many architects find themselves in similar political arenas, there is most certainly no consensus. Architecture generally finds resonance in operations of justice and subverting power, but at times it works to reinforce power with little resistance. Additionally, much of the reasoning behind architecture operating antithetical to power is due to the current political climate. I’m not sure there is anything about justice or equity that is universal to the aims of all architecture circles if those political problems were suddenly, magically dissolved.

So are we in a new, slightly modified era in which architecture returns to a culture?

Secondly, culture is not singular today. It feels more like a soupy existential hell. Media and communication have brought about a great flattening of culture. The singular culture of yesterday has been reduced to vague majorities barely treading water in a murky river of subcultures (with everyone watching the ugly dying gasps of western white male hegemony, somehow still floating by on a raft made by... well you get the picture...). Today I can be a goth and tomorrow I can be a hipster, furry, or a sad boy. I can purchase all the needed accouterments in one trip to my local shopping center. Looking at culture through the armature of this decentralization suggests something else: we are in an era of architecture cultures.

Producing positions is rather easy, testing them is difficult, and changing them is very hard.

Architecture memes (and memes in general) can be understood as a symptom of this great flattening. My project is in its infancy yet pervades undergraduate desk crits in the Midwest, disobedient student journals in the Pacific Northwest, mutinous posters on the East Coast, and recalcitrant water cooler conversations in India. In addition, as expected, multiple architecture meme accounts have surfaced that may eventually overtake my own.

Don’t fret, I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, but if architecture is cultures, then my own view represents the culture of a small constituency. In internet parlance, I make niche memes. This is seen through my support of the ‘OOO’ project, my love for the slipperiness of SCI-Arc, and my distaste for Bjarke Ingels as a paragon of design (though this stance may be growing, thankfully). All of these positions, specific they may be, can be tested through mimetic dispersal.

Producing positions is rather easy, testing them is difficult, and changing them is very hard. This column serves as a place where attitudes may germinate and grow some legs to gain wider traction. This might result in some starting points for additional research that, at the very least, allows for further investigation into the public perception of what architecture is as such.

Tagged

About the Author

Ryan Scavnicky is the founder of Extra Office. The practice investigates architecture’s relationship to contemporary culture, aesthetics, and media to seek new agencies for critical practice. He studied at L'Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris and DAAP in Cincinnati for his Masters of ...

4 Comments

To not affect the trajectory here; will simply note that Mr. Scavnicky's contribution to the discourse of architecture should be amplified and reflected on more assuming kids in his generation even reflect.

Looking forward to future ExtraExtras. I think Ryan is on to something close to actual criticism. Compared to most op-eds here and the overwhelming majority of commenters being jaded & insecure boomers, this column feels like fresh air. It's easy to inflate the significance of capital A Architecture by relentlessly reposting the greatest hits and requoting the oft-quoted Greats. It's also a very convenient move to contribute to the ladder-climbing individual-genius narrative if your own ambitions lie at the top of Architecture's silo. archinect needs to help itself move into the future without succumbing to the depressingly nihilistic attitude of its founding - and aging - early adopters, and reject those that rely on brown-nosing and credential-crafting to progress their own careers for their own benefit. Ryan's column I think has the potential to help change this culture, despite his complicity in some of these things.

Archinect has a unique position as the largest forum for architectural discussion outside of Facebook. its independence compels it to take a stronger stance against the bland discourse pervasive across academia. Silicon Valley's term "frictionless design" describes exactly this dangerous type of criticism that allows capital and its power to coexist with an aesthetic of dissent, rather than actual thing.

I get it, we're all afraid of losing institutional support. we have to keep everything vague and distant through "aesthetic research" and vague notions of justice in order to get grants, but all this serves to maintain the status quo. We're still steeped in postmodernism, and its default "anything-goes" internal discourse increasingly has to come up with stronger alibis to excuse its implicit support for existing modes of power which atomize discussions of class, privilege, and even what it means to build better futures. there's a world out there; let's leave our bubbles behind. sorry if this means you all lose your fragile little reputation built on post-review schmoozing and trend appropriation. squiggles will be exhausted in 2019, if not already dead. following existing vectors is the easy work. as long scav said, "Producing positions is rather easy, testing them is difficult, and changing them is very hard."

Marshal McLuhan said "the medium is the message" what if Trump was per article above the Medium.

Think about it - the most talked about human in history, he's not a man, he's a medium, apply Trump to potatoes and half the room will eat them and the other half will run (this applies to USA, I doubt civilized countries care).